Nightcrawlers for Sale

We sold nightcrawlers from our house for several years. Becky really got it all started when she saw how much others were charging for a dozen worms and remembered how easy they were to collect when she was younger. She made a big sign for our front yard, we collected several dozen one evening and we were in business. Well, maybe it’s not all that easy.

Going out once in awhile and hunting nightcrawlers can be fun but when you are doing it almost every night it gets a little tiresome. Fingers actually get soar from grabbing the things. Generally, you drive your thumb and index finger into the ground trying to catch the worm and then hold on until it tires and then slowly pull it out of the ground trying not to break it.

It was a competitive market! We started out selling them for 75 cents a dozen. That forced other sellers to lower their price. As the summer progressed the price went up, as worms were harder to find in the hot weather. Because I had a sales tax permit I could buy worms in bulk form Rose’s Bait Shop in West Burlington. I had to have the permit for my house painting business.

Rose’s actually imported their worms from Canada. They came in Styrofoam cooler like boxes they called lugs. A lug of worms was determined by weight but usually was about 400 worms. Smaller worms meant more worms. We liked that because it meant more profit and a small Canadian worm was still plenty large for a fisherman. Their large worms were huge!

The profit, of course was much better when we were finding our own worms so we tried to do that as often as possible. During the years we sold worms we averaged over $1000 per summer. Not bad for a part time job and nice summer income. We reported the income for sales tax and paid the 3 cents on a dollar to the state. Yes, we also reported it all on our income taxes.

We initially kept the worms in the refrigerator and sold them right out of our front door. Becky quickly grew tired of worms in the refrigerator and we moved them to a large cooler on the back porch. We started directing people to the back door to pick them up.

That worked well! Many fishermen just came down the alley and came to the back door. Sometimes they woke us up early looking for worms. Other times we were gone and lost customers, which we didn’t like. We had some regular customers who asked if we could leave worms out on our patio for them. We put them in a smaller cooler and left a cup in it for payment. That worked well and they always left the money.

As time went by we moved the large cooler to the patio and gradually customers got used to the self-service nightcrawler business. That’s when the trouble started! You can read about that in the next installment.